Introduction

• Jurisdiction: Washington

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Ramsey Ramerman and Eric M. Stahl, Editors-in-Chief

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See "ABOUT THE EDITORS-IN-CHIEF" under Preliminary Matters for Ramsey Ramerman's and Eric M. Stahl's biographical information.

This deskbook provides comprehensive coverage of Washington's Public Records Act (PRA), Chapter 42.56 RCW, as well as related areas of public access to government records and proceedings. Its focus is on the law applicable to making, responding to, and litigating PRA requests.

This is the second edition of WSBA's Public Records Act Deskbook. It is not just an update of the existing deskbook. Rather, it contains substantial revisions from the first edition (which was published in 2006 and last updated in 2010) and offers significantly expanded coverage. Although many of the authors who contributed to the first edition have also written chapters on similar subjects in this second edition, most of these chapters have been fully revised and rewritten and are not just updates.

This deskbook is a joint effort by practitioners representing both requestors and agencies—two constituencies that generally are on opposing sides of public records disputes. Like the plaintiff and defense bars in other areas, they sometimes disagree sharply on what the law ought to be and, to a lesser extent, on what the current state of the law is. To provide an accurate and balanced perspective, every chapter in this deskbook that was written by a public agency practitioner has been edited by someone who primarily represents records requestors, and vice-versa; and a number of chapters have been co-written by agency and requestor authors. One of the editors-in-chief is an attorney who primarily represents news requestors (Eric M. Stahl) and the other is one who represents agencies (Ramsey Ramerman).

The idea of having two editors-in-chief arose after a joint WSBA-CLE presentation by Ramsey Ramerman and Greg Overstreet, who was the sole editor-in-chief of the first edition of this deskbook. The topic was "public records request gone bad," based on an unfortunate experience one of Greg's clients had with a state agency. While both Ramsey and Greg went into the presentation expecting it to be confrontational, they were surprised to find they agreed almost completely on the question of where the agency had erred and how litigation could have been avoided. More broadly, they found they were generally on the same page with the "big picture"—particularly, the fundamental importance of the PRA in assuring government transparency and the best practices agencies should follow to fulfill the statute's purpose and to avoid lawsuits.

Our experience in editing this deskbook has been similar. Requestor and agency authors tend to frame issues very differently, but in most cases the disagreement is not as deep as may appear at first blush. Much of our work as editors has been to help state issues in a manner that both requestors and agencies could accept. We believe the balanced writing and editing process we have followed has resulted in a work that fairly states what the law is and fairly identifies areas of disagreement. Our goal with this joint approach was not to eliminate bias (which is probably impossible in this area of practice) but rather to be clearer about when it is being expressed. To that end, the main...